The open community shares a need for more information to help us with our work. We know, for example, there are many policies supporting open education at institutions and governments throughout the world. Many of us know some of these policies, but it would be extremely helpful if we had a single database of open education policies, from around the world, that the entire community could access and update.

To meet this goal, Creative Commons (CC) has received a small grant to create an “OER Policy Registry.” The Open Education Resources (OER) Policy Registry will be a place for policy makers and open advocates to easily share and update OER legislation, OER institutional policies and supporting OER policy resources. We have begun to enter OER policies into the registry, but we need your help to make it a truly useful global resource.

The open movement is reaching a stage where we’ve had some real, concrete OER policy victories and there is the potential to achieve many more. Sharing our collective knowledge of existing OER policies, in the same way we believe in sharing educational resources, will help advocates and policymakers worldwide be more successful.

Forward this message to your colleagues, to your lists, blogs, and other channels, to ensure that we get as much input as possible. As the OER movement is global, it is critical that we capture OER policies from around the world.

Everyone can add OER policies to the google form for the next month. Beginning on May 1, the OER Policy Registry will move to the Creative Commons (CC) Wiki. Anyone will be able to edit the OER Policy Registry on the CC Wiki, and all wiki text will be licensed under CC BY.

We’re starting with a google form because (a) it’s easy and (b) wikis require you to create an account before editing, and that may be a barrier to participation.

CC is in contact with other projects that started to collect similar information, including UNESCO, CoL, the Florida Distance Learning Consortium, EU OCW and a project in New Zealand. We will add OER policy data they gather as it becomes available. If anyone knows of other efforts to gather OER policies, please send them to Anna Daniel: anna@creativecommons.org and we will reach out to them too.